Got $6? Buy Yourself A Japanese Beef Rice Bowl From This Hawker Stall

It's a pure coincidence that Amoy Street Food Centre's five-month-old beef bowl player Kinobe sits in the same unit that $10-wagyu-peddling Gyu Nami built their name on before it decamped to a basement unit at the swankier Orchard Gateway mall. Run by two first-time young hawkers, they are fulfilling their teenaged dream of owning a business together, selling beef and pork rice bowls inspired by co-owner Genji Lee’s frequent trips to Japan.

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Bros for life

"We've known each other since our secondary school days, and back then, we used to slack on void decks and daydream that we would one day want to open our own business together," explains Lee. After separate stints in banking for Benjamin Quah, 28, and in DJing and working in operations in F&B venues (such as Chupitos and The Beast) for Genji, 27, the pair finally decided to turn their teen dreams into reality.

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Hawker history

Interestingly, both Genji's and Benjamin's parents are also in the hawker trade. Genji's parents run Beauty Fruit Stall in West Coast Market and Benjamin's mom runs Geylang Lorong 9 Fresh Frog Porridge in Ang Mo Kio Avenue 10. The pair jumped into the #hawkerlyfe with the knowledge that it would take hard work to make the dream work and self-funded Kinobe with their savings.

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My way

Still, that didn't quite prepare them for just how tough running a hawker stall actually is. The decision to set up a hawker stall came more out of their desire to keep initial business costs low, rather than to follow in their parents’ footsteps. And to Lee’s surprise, his parents were not opposed to his decision to go into the hawker trade. “They just warned me that it will be hard work, but I enjoy a challenge,” says Lee. That same intrepid spirit drove them to start their own concept from the ground up, as opposed to building on the hawker stall foundations their parents already built. “It’s definitely a much tougher way to do things, but we think the whole experience of figuring things out for ourselves makes it more exciting and satisfying,” Lee explains.

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Early start each day

The short menu of gyudon and butadon here is seemingly simple to execute, but it still gets the guys up much earlier than in their previous lives. "After plenty of trials and adjustment to our recipes, we realised that the only way to cook our bowls the way we like them is to wake up at 4am daily and start cooking at 6am," says Genji.

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The look

Within their standard-issue 10-square-metres stall, you'll get a quick overview of most of the ingredients that go into the meals here. "Anybody who walks up to the stall can replicate our recipe," Genji jokes. Restaurant-sized bags of bonito powder and US short grain rice sit next to hefty jugs of mirin and Kikkoman soya sauce. The two bowl options are advertised on a banner just below their signboard and Genji or Benjamin takes your orders before they scoop rice and assemble the fixings in each bowl and hands it over to you for sustenance. When the office swarm descends on the popular hawker centre though, be prepared to wait in line for a taste of Kinobe's dons. At times, the queue can be 20-minutes-long, which rivals the Wah Kee Noodles selling wanton mee next door.

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Gyudon, $6

Kinobe's main flaw lies in the constraints placed on it by its hawker locale — the food costs for a dish that leans heavily on its meat are understandably high. While each serving looks impressive with ribbons of meat and onions coddling a wobbly onsen egg, we found ourselves with too much short-grained rice (which has a nice bite), and not enough meat to complete the meal. For the health-conscious CDB lunch nibbler, those carby proportions are guaranteed to egg on that post-lunch slump. Still, we'd return for this if we're craving our gyu and can't afford to get splashy with our cash. The shabu-shabu slices give your teeth something to chew into and the flavour of the beef and seasonings are pretty spot on. Each mouthful strikes the perfect balance between the sweet mirin, umami of the soya sauce, and the husky note of cow. The beef used here is a short blade (cleaved from the shoulder of the cow) from the US and each order gets you 100g of meat.

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Butadon, $5

Like its beefy brother, the Butadon is also bottom-heavy with rice dominating the bowl. The seasoning in this and the gyudon, however, is what drives the owners to rise before dawn. A base broth of dashi and pork bones have to be simmered for six hours to reach a flavour the owners are happy with, and that ultimately lends the strips of chewy Dutch pork belly (100g with each serving) and its accompanying gravy a richer flavour of hog than other hawker pork dons. That said, we prefer the gyudon to this, because the butadon is a touch too porky.

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Bottom Line

Kinobe doesn't serve buttery, high-grade beef and you get more rice than meat with each serving, but that's okay. For just $6, you get to tame your craving for a Japanese-style rice bowl, and it's a decent — if not the most memorable — offering.